Description
DOORS
Value of the Vows
Ed Young
April 28-29, 2007
When it comes to relationships, God wants us to take it to an HNL. That’s right. Husbands, how many do we have here? Husbands, lift your hands. God wants to take your marriage to the HNL. How many wives do we have? Ladies, that’s right, God wants you to take your marriage to the HNL.
If you’re engaged, how many engaged people do we have? If you’re engaged, wave your hand. Man, you have a lot to look forward to. Yeah, there are some engaged people out there. God wants to take your relationship into marriage and he wants to take it to an HNL. You might be going, “Ed what is an HNL? What are you talking about, HNL?” A ‘hole ‘notha level. Say it with me, “A ‘hole ‘notha level.”
I don’t care about Webster’s dictionary anymore, forget Webster’s. That is old school. I go to the urban dictionary because the urban dictionary tells me, “HNL is best said when a person or event does something wonderfully unheard/unseen of or does something better than what was previously done. It is usually proceeded by ‘took it to the.’”
How do you close the door on divorce and open the door to marital fulfillment? You do it God’s way. I know a lot of you here are in different circumstances and in different stages of relational satisfaction.
Some of you say, “Ed, you know what? My marriage is going great. We have just walked through the door of marital fulfillment. It is amazing. It is phenomenal. We are in love, and love is growing and…”
If that’s you, good for you. Others are saying, “Ed, you know what? My marriage is like same old, same old. It’s pretty predictable. It’s rut-like. It’s good and all that, but I don’t know, it’s like a comfortable chair or a good pair of jeans, it is just there.”
Others here would say, “Man, my marriage is hanging from a thread. My marriage is not what it should be.” And maybe just maybe you came here today looking for loopholes. Maybe you want to find something that I’ll say or you’ll do some scriptural gymnastics because you want to go through the door of divorce. You’re thinking, “Okay, I can go through the door of divorce and hook up with someone else.”
Let’s just stop for a second and realize that God wants to take all the marriages here to an HNL, a ‘hole ‘notha level. So it doesn’t matter where you are or how many times you have gone through divorce, God wants you to start today because he had a wonderful plan for you.
We have been looking at John 10, do you remember that? In John 10 Jesus said, “I am the door.” Not a door; the door. And he said, “If anyone…” (that means you and me) “…walks through the door then they’ll be saved and they’ll be safe and they’ll be satisfied.” In other words, we’ll discover what the abundant life is all about.
God is cheering for you and for me. He wants our marriages, especially, to be HNL marriages. He wants them to really experience abundant and fulfillment and excitement and vitality. Marriage, relationships, we have a desire for it.
There are going to be 2.3 million marriages this year in our nation. Think about that, 2.3 million weddings. That’s a lot of weddings; yet, as we’re rushing to the altar, what are we doing? 50 percent of first marriages end in divorce; 67 percent of second marriages end up in the deep weeds; 74 percent of third marriages don’t make it. So it’s paradoxical. On one end, we’re rushing to the altar. On the other hand, we’re rushing to divorce court. Yet, we still think about marriage. That’s the goal, that’s the agenda, that’s the deal.
By the way, how do you spell marriage? This is how you spell marriage: W O R K. Now some of you who are engaged and some of you singles are thinking, “What’s he talking about?” Yes, marriage is spelled w-o-r-k.
So we have to maintain a marital work ethic. If we’re going to close the door on divorce and open the door to marital fulfillment, we have to maintain a tireless marital work ethic. That’s what we have to do. So this message is not just, “How do I keep from divorce? How do I evade divorce?” It’s more than that. It’s more positive than that. It’s much more fulfilling than that. Yes, it is closing the door on divorce. But it’s also opening the door to true marital fulfillment.
We work to get married. And then once we’re married, a lot of us stop working. We end up working at something else. We’ll work on our connection with our kids; we’ll work on a relationship at the office; we’ll work on our golf game or work at playing tennis or work at decorating a house. So often, though, we forget to work on the foundation of the marriage.
I have discovered something: marriage is not the easiest thing, it’s the hardest thing. But so often, it can become the greatest thing if we do the hardest thing first.
Think about your job. You get up, have the coffee, rush to the office, you look as good as you can, you get there, you’re making calls, you’re taking initiative, you’re giving these ideas, you’re pitching innovations to this person and that person, you’re bagging clients and you’re doing the stuff. That’s work.
What if you took that same energy and effort and put it into your marriage? Have you ever thought about, what if you treat your office or your work site like you treat your home? Show up in your underwear saying, “Where’s the remote honey?” That wouldn’t work, would it? We have to work. It takes work to have a date night; it takes work to spend quality time talking and communicating; it takes work to live out this covenant before God.
We need to work on our relationship with Jesus Christ; it all begins there. It is all about the door, because only when Christ is living through me can I have a great marriage. And men, we need to work on meaningful conversation and romance. And the ladies here, I’m talking about the wives, they need to work on sex and they need to work on that physical aspect of the marriage.
I’m just boiling it down and making it very, very simple. Because we love to take things and make the simple complex, have you noticed that? Like working out. It is not rocket science. Being in good shape is not that difficult. What do you do? Fruits, vegetables, lean meats, do some cardio, pump some iron and you’ll be in good shape. But no, our culture has it all confused.
You have to do Pilates on steroids. You have to do circuit training and do cardio 1.5 hours and intersperse that with circuit training along with some free weights. And then the Zone diet. And then eat grapefruit 14 times a day and then… We’ve made the simple complex. But it’s not that hard.
Spiritual maturity. It is so complex, spiritual maturity. “Oh, you have to go to this class or that class and know the Greek and the Hebrew and the Aramaic and what eschatology is. And how about numerology and all the -ologies and then you’ll be deep.”
No, no, no. Don’t believe that. Spiritual maturity is simple. You walk through the door. You get to know Jesus Christ by reading his word, through prayer, through involvement at the local church. Then you will begin to grow when you get outside of yourself and discover what it means to be a full-court follower of Christ.
We’ve made the simple complex. Marriage is the same. “Oh marriage is so complex…” Marriage is not complex. “It’s just so hard.” It’s not that hard. “Marriage is…” Just go to Barnes & Noble and the shelves sag with all the books on marriage and all the intricacies on relationships. And then you listen to people talk on the talk shows; you listen to all the relational experts and it gets more and more confusing.
It’s really about work. When I get outside of myself and when Lisa gets outside of herself, and when we follow Christ and submit to him, we’re going to have a great marriage.
Now, speaking of work, I sat down and talked to someone about the work ethic of marriage that you might recognize. And here’s what she said.
[A video is played on the side screens of Ed interviewing Fellowship Church’s worship leader, Yanci McGregor about growing up in a divorced home.]
Ed: Yanci, we see you on stage, and so many people know that you were Miss Texas. You hail from Childress, Texas. And a lot of people probably think, “Yanci has a problem-free life. She probably grew up in this storybook setting.” Yet, things were a little bit different than that.
Yanci: There were a lot of things growing up that were really difficult. And through that; through a lot of different divorces and remarriages with both my mom and my dad, there was kind of a tumultuous childhood that we had growing up.
Ed: Yes. I’m amazed at how easy, just looking at our culture today, how easy we walk through the door of divorce. It seems as though the door of divorce is everywhere. And so many people just negotiate it thinking, “Okay, I get a divorce and it is just between two parties, just a man and a woman.” Yet, you would say otherwise.
Yanci: I would. And it is something that really scared me in thinking about getting married with all of the divorce that I saw around me just within my family, all the different divorces. My mom was married and divorced three times. I know what God says about marriage and that we’re supposed to stay married, but I’ve seen the consequences of what happens when a marriage ends in divorce.
Ed: Would you said, too, that many people need to experience God’s grace and forgiveness and mercy who have gone through that? I know a lot of people would be in that boat.
Yanci: Absolutely, because the guilt of going through it, I think with a lot of people, is too much. And I know even looking at that with my mom, one of the reasons she rushed into her second marriage was because she had just a huge degree of guilt because her first marriage didn’t work. And so she was so anxious to try to have a marriage that worked that she rushed into it instead of taking a breath and reevaluating her life and not just looking for a quick fix.
Ed: Yes, now tell me what your mom has commented over the years about divorce, about her life.
Yanci: When I was talking to my mom, I was talking to her on the phone this week, and she was telling me that—we were in an in depth conversation about life and things—that she wished that things were different. And she was crying and she said, “I wish that I had not divorced your dad.”
Ed: Whoa
Yanci: And those words are words I never thought that I would hear from my mom. They have been divorced for 21 years, and it was a very bitter and angry divorce where we really, for a long time, didn’t even see my dad. And for her to say those words; for her to say, “I wish that I had never done that; I wish that we had forced ourselves to work through it because the problems we thought we were dealing with are the same things I’ve been dealing with these last 21 years. And I wish that I had just dealt with them with your dad instead of with all those other people.”
Ed: That’s what’s so sinister about it. People walk through the door of divorce and they get into another relationship, and after a while it’s the same junk, same problems, the same issues. So I always say every marriage has the same issues. Everybody goes through the same stuff.
Yanci: I can see that.
Ed: But the successful ones negotiate through those and they walk through the door of marital fulfillment. Because I think when you successfully negotiate those issues, there is a whole new world behind the door of fulfillment, and there’s some phenomenal stuff that God has for us.
Other people, though, Yanci, have walked into one of our five campuses and they’re thinking, “Man, I’m looking for loopholes. I want a way out. Maybe Ed is going to say something, or I can see some fine print in the Bible or maybe something that you would say would give me a chance to bolt because I’ve got someone else in mind. And I would rather get out of it and look for some kind of deal to ease my guilt.”
Yanci: And I mean anything that is worth having is worth working for.
Ed: That’s good.
Yanci: I mean, you’re going to have to fight for it to make it work. And you’ve said before—it’s not the way we feel about it. It’s that commitment. There’s not anything in life that we want to have that’s worth having, just like working out or being healthy, that’s not a decision. It’s little decisions every day. It is discipline in going to work out. It is just like in your marriage. You have to work on your marriage. You have to have that time you set aside to communicate.
Ed: And that’s what our world tells us. Our culture says, “If you feel it, it’s real.” And we go to the movies and maybe the guys here take their girlfriends or their wives to see the proverbial chick-flick, romantic comedy.
Yanci: I hate romantic comedies. I just want them to show the next day when they’re both there in their pajamas and the house is dirty. They never show that part.
Ed: They never do. But that is kind of hammered into our minds, you know? Whether it be the romance comedy or the romance novel or five ways to a better relationship or a better relationship in some magazine or whatever. We think it’s that easy. It’s that quick, it’s instantaneous. And we live in this society where if things don’t work in 24 hours, we’re going to throw it out like we take the trash out. What have you taken into your marriage from divorce? Because you saw your parents walk through the door of divorce.
Yanci: Uh-huh.
Ed: And you’ve seen your mom and dad go through the door now several times. What have you learned? How are you breaking the cycle of this? How are you closing up that door and opening the other to marital fulfillment?
Yanci: Well, I think one thing is knowledge of realizing that what happened in the past and how it has affected me. One of the biggest things is, my mom and her sisters raised me with having men who were not around or who were having affairs or who were abusive, all of those things. These women that I was so strongly influenced by grew up telling me, “Don’t you depend on a man for anything. You learn to take care of yourself. You can be strong. Don’t depend on them for security. Don’t depend on them for money, because they’re going to let you down.”
And that’s what I grew up being told. And so you try to take that into a marriage, and it don’t work. That’s not the biblical way. I didn’t even know how much that had impacted me until we went to counseling, and we started looking at that. First of all, to really trust a man, for me to trust my husband—and Chris is such a great guy. He’s such a godly man, and I’m so thankful for that. That’s the best thing I did was marry a good man. I mean, thank goodness.
[The video on the side screens ends. Ed speaks live from stage.]
You know, marriage starts out as an ideal then it becomes an ordeal. And after a while, we’re looking for a new deal, aren’t we?
So it’s time to take marriage to an HNL, a ‘hole ‘nother level. So maintain that work ethic.
Here is something else you want to do if you want to close the door on divorce and open the door on marital fulfillment. Well, let me tell you this story before I tell you what I’m going to describe and unpack.
Several years ago I went to Lisa’s 20th high school reunion, which was hilarious because people had gained at least 20 pounds, and they were still trying to act like they did back in the day. People were still trying to shake their groove thing, you know, with the disco ball and all the videos. The reunion committee did a great job, though, because they simply were taking the past and bringing it into the present, which is pretty good. The past into the present. They were keeping the past current.
Well, I thought about that. And I thought about marriage because a great marriage does the same thing. We take the past and bring it into the present. We keep our vows current.
I’ve done a lot of weddings and I know all sorts of vows. And when a bride and a groom recite the vows, most of them are totally just on another planet. They’re like out of body experience. We don’t even realize what we’re saying. It’s like, “I pledge my faith to you in sickness and in health, what am I saying? What am I doing?” And we have those thoughts. A great marriage, though, is going to keep those vows current.
So I want to challenge you—you’re talking about some work—to retrieve your vows back in the day—it could have been even 6 months ago—and recite the vows to your spouse once a month. That’s your homework.
“Well man, I don’t know where my vows are.” If not, log onto our website and you’ll see something called “vows” and click on it. And it will have some great vows to recite to one another.
Because when we said those words before God and some family and friends, we were getting into a covenant. Not just a commitment. I’m talking about a covenant. That’s a commitment on steroids. That’s a relationship on a ‘hole ‘notha level.
That’s what God desires. And throughout the Bible we have this beautiful covenant thing going on. And it’s reflective in the marriage because Jesus said, “A marriage is a symbol of Christ’s relationship, his passion, his love, toward the church.” How does Jesus love the church? Selflessly and sacrificially.
And speaking of that whole vibe, if you have your Bibles, turn to Ephesians 5:25. It says, “Husbands, love your wives just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.” Do you know the apostle Paul spent twice as many words talking to husbands as he did wives? That’s interesting.
Love. What is love anyway? Love is from God. True love is from God. It really is. And love is a decision. It’s all about commitment; yet our world says love is something else.
There are three types of love that marriages are built upon. These are very, very important to get down. The first is agape love. Say agape with me, “Agape.” That’s unconditional love. That is the kind of love Jesus has for the church. We don’t deserve it. We’re self-centered sinners. We’ve committed all these moral turnovers. God is holy, he is pure. Why would God send Jesus to love us irrationally and unconditionally? Because of this agape love. Marriage should be all about agape love.
There is another type of love: phileo. Say it with me, “Phileo.” You’ve heard of Philadelphia. That’s the city of brotherly love. This phileo love is the companionship thing. It’s the friendship thing. That’s got to be in play in marriage. So we have agape and we’ve got phileo.
Now we have something else called eros love. Say eros with me, “Eros.” We get the word erotic from eros. That’s the passion, that’s the fire. That’s what it is. Think about eros as kindling. You make a fire. To have a good fire you’ve got to have kindling. But you don’t build the fire just on kindling. That would be a horrible fire because it won’t last very long. You start a fire with kindling and nothing else, it’s gone. It’s gone. It’s hot for a while, then it’s gone.
Great marriages, HNL marriages, have the firewood of agape and phileo. And they also have the kindling of eros, and you have that fire. The reason our world and our culture doesn’t understand marriage or relationships is because everything is about eros. It’s all about eros.
Have you ever noticed that as you watch television or read the newspapers, people say, “That’s sexy. She’s so sexy. He’s so sexy. That outfit is sexy. That car is really sexy. His house or her house is sexy.” What’s up with that?
I’ll tell you what’s up with that. It’s eros. It’s just kindling. You can’t do jack with kindling. You can’t have a marriage; you can’t have a real relationship. And you wonder why people burn through marriage after marriage, go through the door after door after door of divorce. It’s all about the kindling. It’s all about that. Keep your vows current. Recite your vows regularly to your spouse.
I was speaking a couple of weeks ago and talked to a friend of mine and we were discussing marriage and he said, “Ed when I married my wife, she was a beautiful woman, a beauty queen. And about a month after we got married, she became desperately ill and she’s been ill, Ed, for 17 years.” He began to cry. He said, “Nothing is normal in my marriage.” He said, “Communication is not normal; intimacy is not normal; life is not normal.” Then he said, “Ed, when I recited my vows, I meant them.”
Wow. That is love. That is the true covenant and foundation, and that’s that HNL marriage that God desires for all of us to have.
I went fishing several years ago, and I saw an alligator. I’ve messed around with alligators before because I am a risk taker. I’ve spent a lot of time in the wild, and I had a plastic worm attached to my rod and reel. So I threw the plastic worm right by the alligator and began to reel the worm by the alligator. He ate it.
I fought him for a while, then he spit it out. You know gators are stupid. I threw it out again, fought him again, he spit it out. Third time, you guessed it, the big reptile leaped on it, he threw it out. I looked at my son and friend in the boat, I said, “You watch this. I’m going to catch this alligator because I’ve caught one before.”
I threw it out again. And the big ole monster jumped on it. I let him swallow it, gave him some line, and I let it get down in that sinister snout, then I set the hook. The thing went bananas! Lily pads were flying, moss was going everywhere.
I reeled this thing all the way to the boat. He was hissing, and we’re like, “Wow, look at the alligator!” I said, “Take my rod.” And my friend held the rod. And I said, “I’m going to whack this gator with a paddle.”
So, here’s this gator looking up at me. So, I take the paddle and as hard as I could, I came down and hit him on the head. When I hit him, the gator dives straight to the bottom and breaks my brand new rod in half. And when the alligator swam off, he was swimming kind of sideways. And when I saw him swim off I said, “Man, he must be male. He’s got to be male to be that stupid!”
The apostle Paul spends twice as many words telling husbands to love their wives as he does wives to love their husbands. Guys, we’re like alligators. We need to be whacked upside the head, don’t we? If I love Lisa selflessly and sacrificially; if I’m working on our relationship; if I’m taking the initiative; if I’m keeping the vows current, wow, marriage is an awesome deal.
Colossians 3:12, “Therefore as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience.”
So we need to do that in marriage. Verse 14, “And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity.”
Our world says love is emotional and uncontrollable. Do you like this shirt right here and tie? It’s pretty cool, right? Thank you. Well, you’re not going to believe how I got dressed this morning. You’re not going to believe how I put this shirt and tie on. This is unbelievable.
I was walking by my closet, I tripped, fell into the closet, and when I got up I was dressed! I fell into my closet and came out with this outfit. If I told you that, you’d think, “Man, that is crazy!”
Well that’s what our world says about love. You just fall in love. You just fall in and all of the sudden you are clothed in love. You just fall in love. You can’t help yourself, “I just saw him, and we fell in love. I just saw her, and we were in love.”
Yes, you have to have that spark; you have to have that chemistry and that vibe. But you’ve got to be with someone long enough to where the shine wears off, to where you’re living in the real world in the dating relationship, and then you commit.
That’s what love is. It’s a decision. You commit, you pledge your position to your spouse, no matter what. Come hell or high water. “I’m committing to you honey,” then the marriage begins.
Well, you worked to that point; you have to keep on working past that point. And you have to keep the vows current. So love is intentional. We clothe ourselves in love.
As I’ve said before, talk to Lisa, we don’t always feel feelings of love every day. I know it’s hard for you to believe, but we don’t. And don’t expect that out of marriage. It is so often the hardest thing, but it can become the greatest thing when we do the hardest things first.
How many people like to do yard work? I don’t. I can’t lift my hand. If you like to do yard work, lift your hand. Some people do, that’s cool. Lift your hand. Lisa loves yard work; I hate it. If you want to have a beautiful yard, what do you do? You maintain it. Just little bit at a time. We work on our marriage a little bit at a time, a little bit at a time. We keep those vows current a little bit at a time, a little bit at a time. And it’s going to be awesome.
I love Kentucky Fried Chicken when I want to cheat on my diet. At KFC there are two recipes—original and crispy, right? Original and crispy. Do you want your marriage original or crispy? It’s your choice. But there is a verse in the Bible that I call the KFC verse, and I want to challenge every relationship here. When I say relationship, I’m defining it this way: the engaged relationships and the marital relationships. Every relationship here. I want you all to be a KFC thing.
It is Ephesians 4:32. Here is what it says, “Be kind and compassionate to one another forgiving each other just as Christ God forgave you.”
I hope you saw KFC. K, kindness; F, forgiveness; C, Christ. Kindness and forgiveness come from who? Jesus. It’s all about Jesus. It’s all about the gospel; it’s all about the door.
Christ lives in us and through us. And then and only then can we truly be kind and compassionate and forgiving. And that is what it means to have this agape love, the phileo love, and the result of that will be this eros love.
You might be thinking, “Ed, this is all good and everything, keep the vows current and work, but what does it mean to put application to that? So what?”
Well, today I’m really excited because we are rolling out something that we have been working on for about a year. Christian attorneys from across the country have been working on this. That’s not an oxymoron; there are Christian attorneys. Also, several licensed family marriage therapists and I have worked on it. Some other pastors have.
This is, right here, marriage on an HNL. [Ed holds up a copy of the C2 Marriage Agreement] It’s called the C2 Creative Covenant Marriage. And here’s the deal. I can’t force you to do this, but here is the deal: this document right here is legally binding.
This document right here helps prevent divorce. But more importantly, it will lead to great marital fulfillment. Because at Fellowship Church, and let me stop right here, people see this across the world in our television ministry. From Amsterdam to San Francisco; from Manhattan to the Virgin Islands, they’ll see this. They’ll hear this on podcast, they’ll watch it on the internet. So I’m talking to everyone—here at one of our five locations and anywhere else.
I believe this is going to be a key element, a lynch-pin type deal to reverse the trend in our culture, to reverse the trend in divorce and to build marital fulfillment.
You might be asking, “Okay, what is it?” Well, Lisa and I are going to sign it. We have to sign it with witnesses and everything. I want to challenge you to think about it. Don’t sign it today.
We even have one for engaged couples, as well. You can pick one up at The Source, we have them at the kiosk, and if you want to learn more, we have a website, www.theCreativeMarriage.com. It will tell you all about it.
Number one, it is about covenant. What is a covenant? It’s a blood bond for life. It is a commitment on steroids, a blood bond for life.
Also, it talks about being involved in the local church. You want to have a great marriage? You want to have a fulfilling marriage? Get involved in the local church. I was talking to someone the other day and she said, “I’m engaged.”
And I said, “Oh really, tell me about him.”
She began to tell me about him, and I said, “Wow, where is he involved as far as the church? And where is his ministry in church?”
And she said, “Well I think he goes to, um, I don’t know.”
I said, “Wait, you know what? I’m thrilled that you’ve connected with this guy, but that’s a red flag. If he is not into the local church and serving somewhere in the local church, then something is wrong.”
As a believer, my heart should beat fast over what Christ’s heart beats fast over and that’s the local church.
Just because you’ve been to the Newcomers Class here at Fellowship Church doesn’t really mean you’re a church member. Yeah, you’re name is on a roll. A real member, in a biblically functioning community, is someone who is serving and doing the stuff. So we talk about church involvement.
We also talk about continuing education in marriage. That is huge. It takes more work to get our driver’s license than a marriage license. Have you ever thought about that? So, we need to work on this. And we talk about different aspects of education where you can learn more and more about this awesome relationship.
Counseling, that’s another one. I am into Christian counseling, biblically based counseling. The first 7 years of our marriage were rocky. Lisa and I will tell you, we had a tough time. One of the biggest reasons that those first years were kind of rocky was because we did not get any biblical Christian counseling.
I beg you, go to Christian counseling. Now, when I say Christian counseling, I’m not talking about some psycho-babble thing where they’re talking about your diapers were put on too tight, and your nursery was painted the wrong color. I’m not talking about that, but I’m talking about getting these issues right.
Now a lot of alligators here, I’m talking to the guys now, are like, “I’m not going to a Christian counselor’s office. No way.” Bop! It took me a while too, guys. I’ll confess. “Lisa, I don’t need to go there. I’m a pastor, I’ve been to seminary, I’ve studied this, I write books about relationships.”
We have to go into the office. And I’m telling you, the Bible talks about this so much. There is a genius and a multiplicity of counselors. Who do I go to? Well, don’t just open the phone book, close your eyes and go, “Okay, I’ll go see him or her.”
No. We have some counselors that we have worked with for many, many years right here at Fellowship Church. Go to our website to find them. We have counselors for you. It will be phenomenal.
I just talked to someone two weeks ago and they just began going to a counselor and they said, “Ed, I should have done this years ago!”
Conflict resolution is something else we talk about here in this legally binding document. See, we want to keep marriage out of the courts. Our whole system is kind of whack when it deals with these issues, generally speaking, because our courts alienate. The wife is over here in this corner, the husband is over here. Keep them separated. That’s what the legal system does.
Well, Matthew 18 and Ephesians 4 say bring them together in the center of the ring and let’s get ready to rumble because we’re going to argue. We’re going to fight. We’re going to have conflict.
I was talking to someone several months ago and they told me, “I’m sure you and Lisa rarely argue.” I was like, “What?!” We argue. We have conflict. That happens. Conflict can be a gateway to a deeper form of intimacy in a marriage when it is handled biblically. We want to do it, not in the courthouse, but in the church house.
So we talk about mediation in this thing. You sign up for it if things aren’t going well. And if divorce is inevitable, we talk about that in there. We’ll go to something called arbitration. So, I really want to challenge you to pick one of these up and to sign them.
Now, I’m going to tell you right now, some of the alligators are going to swim off, and we don’t want to sign this. The women are thinking right now, “I want to sign this. This is going to give me even more security.” And that is true.
So guys, we’ve got to step up and show the love. We have to take the initiative and do this. Think about it, sign up, and I’m telling you some awesome things will happen.
Now what else do I tell you? How many engaged couples do we have? If you’re engaged, lift your hands. If you’re engaged or thinking about marriage, do you know we have a Nearlywed/ Newlywed class that we have taught here since the Vietnam War here at Fellowship? Lisa and I didn’t go to one, and I wish I could reverse time and I wish we could have gone to one of those things. They are taught by some phenomenal people, some Christian counselors right here at Fellowship Church.
We also have Divorce Recovery. I bet you the majority of us here have dealt with divorce in some way, shape, form or fashion. We have Divorce Recovery. It is one of the most exciting ministries here at Fellowship Church. Divorce is not the unforgivable sin. It is not. There is forgiveness and cleansing and you have an opportunity to do it right the next time. We have Divorce Recovery. I think we are in our second session in Divorce Recovery right here and you can start attending. Go to the website, go to the kiosk and ask, “Where’s divorce recovery?” We will point you to the way. Of course, I’ve already mentioned counseling. So those are some exciting things.
Next week—I wanted to do this today, but I can’t—next week we’re going to talk about the four horsemen of divorce. There are four predictors of divorce that I’ve discovered. And these horsemen are galloping. You have a great chance of walking and running through the door of divorce; however, there is some good news.
See, this is a positive thing because there are also some horsemen of marital fulfillment. So, how do we take the reigns and slow the horses down and turn the horse and have the horse gallop toward marital fulfillment?
There are also four predictors that counteract the four horsemen of divorce. There are four predictors of marital fulfillment. How do we reconcile the two? We’re going to do that right here next time.
You know what, though? Looking back, if you’re married or if you’re engaged, let’s just go ahead and take the door of divorce out. What do you think? Guys, come out here, let’s go ahead and take it out because it’s time we take it out of our vocabulary.
[The stage crew comes out and removes the prop door that represents divorce.]
It is time we take off the threat thing. It is time we take it out even as an option, because marriage is for one man and one woman together for life. It’s a relationship on a ‘hole ‘notha level.